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The classical form of Forecasting is to apply statistics to project future trends in Demand, based on historical sales transactions, using either Excel or Advanced Planning Systems like SAP’s APO or IBP. Recently I have been researching the use of Predictive Analytics (PA) in Forecasting Demand as well as Sales and learned a whole new […]

The Digital Transformation of business can be overwhelming. Unless you’re a start-up, social networking, predictive analytics, the Internet of Things, blockchains, etc., can easily bring you to a state of information congestion and a strong sense of inadequacy. Thus, I thought I’d give it a shot at trivializing the topic and help make the entire […]

Many of my friends have iPad’s at work but only use them to browse the Internet and open emails. One of them told me “the only problem is that when I open a PowerPoint presentation, the format is all messed up” and I wondered “how can it be?”… Yes, after 6 years, a lot of people […]

Drug shortages can’t be solved by using ‘the system’; only by hacking that system. A hack, as defined by Sean Parker, the creator of Napster and Facebook pioneer “is ‘a clever work-around or a clever way of leveraging an existing system to do something you didn’t think it was going to be able to do’ ” […]

I was reading this Associated Press article about drones in Africa (Rwanda) to deliver medication and it once again occurred to me that somehow Africans manage to rollout technology in use cases that take so long and seem so daunting in highly developed regions like North America or Europe. Another such case is how Africans overcame the […]

A common supply chain model in large, integrated multinationals, is a network of Plants serving many markets. Each Plant makes products for many Markets; and, in each Market, a Commercial Unit brings products from multiple Plants into a single Market. In the Generics Pharmaceutical industry for instance, all the top players function this way. This […]

Information technology in Enterprise used to be extraneous – work is here, technology is there. IT departments would bring in new tech or enhance it and then “users” would test it and accept it. That is no longer today’s reality. Cloud, mobile and big data have changed things. Today’s technology is intimate to business, it […]

The % of companies that report success implementing social media in Operations – i.e., at the core of the Enterprise – was the same in 2014 as in 2011 – about 30%. Why? Facebook is probably the information technology with the fastest and broadest penetration in our society – ever! It reached 50M people in […]

Consider this image: on the left is the Apple remote. On the right is a Blu Ray player remote. Essentially, they both fulfill the same function: to play a movie and to navigate back and forth through the movie. Sure, a Blu Ray machine and iTunes aren’t the same thing as mediums that contain movies; […]

You can’t look at the future from the standpoint of the present. Friends of mine asked me to attend a strategic planning session where they were discussing ideas to improve who they were and how they could wow their customers. This is what I told them: you are here, now, you see yourselves in this […]